THE INEXTINGUISHABLE SYMPHONY

NPR culture commentator Goldsmith greatly embellishes the true story of how his mother and father survived the Holocaust with the help of love, music, and Goebbels’s Juedische Kulturbund, an organization showing off Jewish artists formed by the Nazis to dispel rumors of anti-Semitism. The stiff deadpan of his oral delivery, which so well serves him on air, may be inappropriate for the drama of this story, but it does tend to mitigate against his writer’s schmaltz. Besides, the history has some importance and is, despite the faults of its telling, totally absorbing. Y.R. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: APR/MAY 02]